


Eye to Eye

by onstraysod



Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Angst, Childhood Memories, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Force sensitivity?, Gen, Helmet removal, One Shot, Prompt Fill, because reasons, oh and gloves too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-17 21:48:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21983533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onstraysod/pseuds/onstraysod
Summary: As a storm batters theRazor Crest, an exhausted Mandalorian tries to get some sleep. But his protective instincts won't allow him to let down his guard for long.
Relationships: Baby Yoda & The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)
Comments: 38
Kudos: 638





	Eye to Eye

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lafiametta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lafiametta/gifts).



> For lafiametta, who gave me the very prompt I had hoped to receive, i.e. Baby Yoda catching Mando with his helmet off.
> 
> I've gone with the name Dyn Jarren for Mando, having no idea whether I'm spelling it correctly or not. If this spelling turns out to be wrong, I'll correct it on down the line.
> 
> UPDATE: Din Djarin!

The planet was sparsely populated, especially in the semi-tropical western reaches: an ideal place for lying low, most likely because the weather was so miserable. It had been raining lightly when they’d landed, the pinnacles of the blue rock mesas lost in a dense blanket of fog, and now as night descended and the planet’s three moons arced up over the obscured horizon, it was raining harder still. Though Din had banked the _Razor Crest_ in tight beneath the wall of a mesa, the rain was slanting from the opposite direction, drumming fitfully on the ship’s hull, a discordant, unending tattoo that he thought might slowly drive him insane.

On the upside, the child seemed to like it. The little creature had spent hours in the cockpit, watching the rivulets of rain spread down the _Razor Crest_ ’s viewscreen with rapt fascination, seeming to forget all about the tempting array of buttons and levers and blinking system lights all around him. After awhile, the steady rhythm of the rain, the merging and separating of the ribbons of water, lulled the alien into a deep sleep, and finding him curled up in the pilot’s seat, eyes firmly closed, Din had carried the child back to the narrow cell that had once been his own sleeping quarters. Carefully depositing the little one on a nest of blankets atop the mattress, scarcely daring to breathe lest the creature wake, Din had watched as the child rolled on to its left side, curled one small hand around the edge of a stuffed tooka toy, and continued its peaceful slumber. Sealing the door, Din sighed, releasing a pent-up tension he hadn’t been aware of carrying, and returned to the cockpit, the pilot’s seat serving now as his own makeshift bed.

The tooka doll was a sore point. Falling into the seat, Din leaned back and stared out the viewscreen, cursing himself - and not for the first time - for the act. He’d been in the middle of a job, for kriff’s sake; tailing an asset through a Rodian marketplace was hardly the right time or place for an impulse purchase. At the time he’d justified it to himself as an attempt to blend in with the other shoppers: as if a Mandalorian in a full suit of polished beskar could blend in anywhere. Catching sight of the colorful toy in a nearby stall, he’d paused to hand over a palmful of credits to the Rodian merchant, who’d commenced to excitedly inform him of how the doll was handcrafted of only the finest materials: molted convor down for the stuffing, Chandrilian woven cloth for the body. He’d been halfway down the block by the time she stopped talking, the toy tooka stuffed into his belt, his quarry disappearing around a corner up ahead. In retrospect, the foolishness of the act was starkly apparent. Sure, he’d caught the target; but buying a child’s toy in a busy marketplace was too conspicuous an act to have gone unnoticed by watchful eyes. Perhaps Xi-an had been right: perhaps he was paranoid. But if he was, it had kept him alive longer than many in his profession. From an abundance of caution, he’d left that planet as soon as the asset was safely stowed in a bed of carbonite, making two false landings to throw any pursuers off the track before delivering the bounty. A sad waste of time and fuel that might easily have been avoided.

Even as he promised himself he’d not make such an error again, he remembered the way the child’s eyes had fixed on the toy when he’d proffered it, growing rounder than usual and bright with excitement. How the little one had clutched it to his chest, humming; how it had been inseparable from the cloth tooka ever since.

“You’re exhausted,” Din said aloud to himself, hoping he was not about to add one-way conversations to his growing list of eccentricities. “And in your exhaustion, you’ve gotten soft. And sloppy.” He sat up, unfastening the plate of his left gauntlet, tugging at the fingers of his glove until it slid free, then doing the same on the right side. There was no denying his weariness. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept for more than a couple of hours at a time, and every muscle in his body ached. He looked down at his bare hands, turning them over, flexing his fingers. They weren’t scarred and calloused like the hands of spice miners or freighter mechanics, anyone who did manual labor without full gloves. But there was age in them all the same: in the prominent veins and tendons coming down from his knuckles, in the creases at his wrists; and it seemed he could feel in them every punch he’d ever landed, every pull of a trigger, every asset struggling to escape his grasp.

Reaching up, he lifted off his helmet and sat it on the console, purposely avoiding the blurred visage reflected in the polished metal. He knew that face too well to have any wish of studying it. It was neither his father’s face, nor his mother’s, but an unrecognizable blend of them both, with a few of his paternal grandfather’s features thrown in for good measure; ironically, it had seen more years now than any of theirs ever had. Each morning when Din did face himself in a mirror, a man still young and vigorous stared back at him, but the reflection was beginning to feel more and more like an illusion. Was that how each of his targets had felt eventually? Staring at themselves in a mirror, not recognizing the haunted, haggard expression in their eyes, the sound of footsteps echoing behind them in every alley or corridor? How long had it taken before the assets’ exhaustion resulted in the missteps that allowed him to turn a profit?

Leaning back again, Din propped his boots on a safe empty section of the console and stretched out his legs. He ran his hands through his hair and reached around to knead at the back of his neck where tension crouched like a Kowakian monkey-lizard, driving its claws into his flesh with every turn of his head. The helmet, like all parts of a Mandalorian’s armor, was made to sculpt itself to its wearer’s body, to become through continued wear a kind of second skin: lightweight, comfortable, flowing with the extension of each muscle and the pivot of each bone. Removing the helmet each night for at least six hours, getting a decent measure of sleep… Yes, then a Mandalorian might scarcely notice the armor encasing even his face. But Din had barely had the helmet off for an hour at a stretch in weeks. He ran his fingers along his jaw and chin, feeling the scrape of two days' worth of thick stubble. Shaving could wait. Everything could wait until he’d stolen as much sleep as he could.

The rain increased, both in its volume and the tempo with which it drummed on the hull. The wind was audible now, too, whistling beneath the wings and along the sheer wall of the mesa. A distant crack of thunder just as Din closed his eyes reminded him, abruptly, of a similar storm, many years ago. Before the Separatists invaded with their endless columns of battle droids. Before he’d known the meaning of loneliness.

_“It’s okay, little one.” His mother’s voice came across the gulf of time, falling over him like a warm blanket. He could remember her sitting on the side of his bed, pulling him into her arms as lightning lit up the sky outside his window. She’d kissed the top of his head and stroked his hair, and he’d buried his face in the cascade of her black curls, all of his terror swiftly replaced by the certainty of safety in her nearness, her touch, her scent. “It’s okay. There is nothing to be frightened of, my dearest. This storm is just another manifestation of the Force, as is everything around us. Even when it seems huge and ferocious and loud, you need not fear it. It is an ally and a friend to us all.”_

_A flash of lightning illuminated the red cloth of his mother’s waist sash and cloak. “I thought the Force was only a friend to the Jedi?” he’d murmured, already growing drowsy in his mother’s embrace._

_“No, my heart. The Force belongs to all of us. Force users, like the Jedi, have a special relationship to it, but we can all of us feel it, and call upon it in times of need. Never forget this, my son. You need only call it, call it to you, trust in it - and you will never be alone.”_

He hadn’t forgotten. He just didn’t believe it. 

The Force had done nothing to stop the laser bolts that had left him a Foundling. The Force had done nothing to take the nightmares away, to ease the longing, to brush away a single tear.

And yet, the words still echoed, in the heat of a firefight, in the slow descent into dreams.

_Call it. Call it to you. Trust in it._

_And you will never be alone._

_Never be alone._

_Alone…_

The shriek woke him.

Din bolted upright, disoriented by a cacophony of sound, unsure if he’d slept for minutes or for hours. The wind outside was blowing so hard it was rocking the _Razor Crest_ , trumpeting like a bantha between the ship and the mesa wall. Thunder exploded overhead, barely a second between each boom, and hailstones mixed with the sheets of rain, creating a deafening percussion that echoed through the interior of the ship. All of this Din had slept through. But the frightened shriek pierced through the wall of his exhaustion like a vibroblade.

He was on his feet instantly, running to the hatch, jumping down the access ladder as the ship shuddered around him. The door of the sleeping berth opened to the slam of his fist against the panel, the overhead light in the little compartment flickering in the charged atmosphere of the storm. For a moment, Din’s heart froze between beats: the pile of blankets was empty, the child no where to be seen. Then, a whimpering sound from the very corner of the berth freed Din of the painful suspense. The little creature had pulled one of the blankets up over his head and was completely obscured by the rumpled cloth, but Din could see that beneath it the child was trembling.

“Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay.” Climbing in upon the mattress and settling his back against one wall, Din scooped up the shaking bundle and held it to his chest. “I know it’s loud, I know, but it’s okay. I promise you. You’re safe in here. I won’t let anything happen to you.” He stroked the child’s back and the small curve of its head, wincing at his own words, how powerless his voice sounded as he spoke them. The violence of the child’s tremors echoed in some deep, hollow part of himself, and he forced more words out, trying to believe them. “You’re safe. We’re safe. _We’re safe_.”

Cradling the swaddled child against his shoulder, bending his head to whisper into the blanket, Din shushed the whimpers emerging from deep inside the cloth. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just… it’s just part of the Force, this storm. And the Force is our friend. It surrounds us and protects us. Even those of us who can’t use it.” The trembling had eased somewhat, and the whimpering had stopped altogether, replaced by the occasional soft gurgle. Patting the child’s back, Din kept talking. He had no idea if the little alien understood a word of what he said, but the sound of his voice seemed to soothe it.

“When I was a kid, not much… bigger than you,” he amended, remembering the creature’s strangely advanced age, “I was scared of storms like this too. I was scared of everything, and I _hated_ being scared. I wanted to be a Jedi then, because I thought if the Force really was my ally, I could control things. Things that were out of my control.” He paused, swallowing hard. “But I was no Jedi. No length of time spent staring at a rock could make it stir. Believe me, I tried. And I would have made a poor Jedi anyway. I don’t have the patience. I can’t bear waiting, sitting and waiting for things to unfold, I--"

He stopped speaking, suddenly aware of two large eyes peering at him above the edge of the blanket. A small green hand tugged the blanket down further, and the eyes grew larger and more luminous than Din had ever seen them before. Tilting its head to one side, then the other, the little creature stared, its mouth agape in wonder. For the longest moment, Din couldn’t understand what had so captured the child’s attention.

His helmet. He had left his helmet on the cockpit console.

The child was seeing his face for the very first time.

Cooing, the child reached up and touched Din’s chin. His three tiny fingers brushed across Din’s stubble and the child giggled, as if the hairs tickled his skin. His dark eyes glistened as he held Din’s own dark gaze, and the Mandalorian was conscious of a place inside of him he hadn’t dared to visit in years, a deep well of memory and emotion that he had thought sealed away beyond all access. Something inside of that place stirred and was broken - or, perhaps, mended.

Unbidden, a thought came into his mind, as clear as a spoken voice, but one he did not recognize…

_Strong you are. A good heart, always have you had. Punish yourself, why? Only now, become you the man you are meant to be. What your mother told you, trust it you must. The Force your ally is. Protect you it will._

Now he was the one who trembled. The child gazed at him curiously, tilting its head to one side again and making a high-pitched babbling noise, as if asking a question. It was the height of folly, maybe, to find human emotions in the eyes of another species, but Din thought the child’s expression was one of concern.

“Hi,” he blurted out, having no idea what else to say. “So. This is my face. This is me. It’s nice to, uh… meet you.” The absurdity of his words struck Din and he found himself grinning, laughing, a sound that had grown almost foreign to his ears for how infrequently he’d heard it.

The child grinned and giggled back.

**Author's Note:**

> The significance of Mando's mother wearing red harkens back to Jyn Erso's mom in _Rogue One_. According to the _Rogue One Ultimate Visual Guide_ , Lyra Erso wore a red sash to signify her allegiance with religious groups that revered the Force. Since Mando's parents in his flashbacks are seen wearing red, I thought that maybe there might be a connection??


End file.
